Attitudes of advanced Australian medical oncology trainees to rural practice

Aim: To identify the views of medical oncology trainees regarding rural training posts and rural practice overall, and to identify factors that may improve recruitment. Methods: A questionnaire was posted to all advanced oncology trainees in Australia in June 2006. The trainees were questioned on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of rural practice, their experience during previous rural rotations and potential incentives and barriers in recruiting trainees and specialist oncologists to regional and rural centers. Results: There was a 60% response rate. Of all participants 58% had considered rural practice. Those with a rural family background were more likely to have considered rural practice. Attitudes based on responses to listed disadvantages and advantages of rural practice were heterogenous. Lifestyle factors seemed to be of particular importance. Although there were perceived deficiencies in opportunities for professional education in rural oncology rotations, 94% felt their rotation had been a positive experience overall and 62% were more likely to consider a rural career following their rural rotation. Improving locum cover for leave was seen as a potential incentive by 97% trainees. Conclusion: Despite positive attitudes towards rural practice, many barriers exist preventing recruitment of medical oncology trainees to rural areas, in particular lifestyle factors that are difficult to modify. Factors that can be improved include improving access to clinical trials, enabling access to locum cover. Educational opportunities for current rural trainees need to be improved. Further study into potential incentives to enhance rural recruitment is required

State-of-the-Art Review of Bibliographic Control of Higher Education in Canada

During the last two decades the quantity and variety of materials providing information on higher education in Canada have increased greatly. Nevertheless, researchers, administrators, instructors and students find it difficult to identify and locate relevant items. The following article reports on a survey of Canadian agencies and institutions collecting higher education materials; identifies four problem areas - definitions, collection policies, accessibility, and collection co- ordination; and recommends further information exchange and the compilation of a more complete directory of collections in higher education.Au cours des deux dernières décennies on a assisté à une augmentation consi-dérable de la quantité et de la variété de l'information ayant trait à l'enseigne-ment supérieur au Canada. Cependant, l'identification et la localisation de ces documents ne sont pas pour autant sans poser des problèmes aux chercheurs, administrateurs, enseignants, et étudiants. L'article suivant signale les résultats d'une enquête portant sur les organismes et établissements canadiens qui recueil-lent des documents relatifs à l'enseignement supérieur. Il identifie quatre caté-gories de problèmes - définitions, politiques de développement des fonds, acces-sibilité des documents, et coordination des collections — et recommande l'inten-sification des échanges d'information ainsi que la compilation d'un répertoire plus complet pour donner accès à ces collections

Estimation of age-stratified contact rates during the COVID-19 pandemic using a novel inference algorithm

Well parameterized epidemiological models including accurate representation of contacts are fundamental to controlling epidemics. However, age-stratified contacts are typically estimated from pre-pandemic/peace-time surveys, even though interventions and public response likely alter contacts. Here, we fit age-stratified models, including re-estimation of relative contact rates between age classes, to public data describing the 2020–2021 COVID-19 outbreak in England. This data includes age-stratified population size, cases, deaths, hospital admissions and results from the Coronavirus Infection Survey (almost 9000 observations in all). Fitting stochastic compartmental models to such detailed data is extremely challenging, especially considering the large number of model parameters being estimated (over 150). An efficient new inference algorithm ABC-MBP combining existing approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methodology with model-based proposals (MBPs) is applied. Modified contact rates are inferred alongside time-varying reproduction numbers that quantify changes in overall transmission due to pandemic response, and age-stratified proportions of asymptomatic cases, hospitalization rates and deaths. These inferences are robust to a range of assumptions including the values of parameters that cannot be estimated from available data. ABC-MBP is shown to enable reliable joint analysis of complex epidemiological data yielding consistent parametrization of dynamic transmission models that can inform data-driven public health policy and interventions. This article is part of the theme issue 'Technical challenges of modelling real-life epidemics and examples of overcoming these'

Functional Brain Hyperactivations Are Linked to an Electrophysiological Measure of Slow Interhemispheric Transfer Time after Pediatric Moderate/Severe Traumatic Brain Injury.

Increased task-related blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) activation is commonly observed in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of moderate/severe traumatic brain injury (msTBI), but the functional relevance of these hyperactivations and how they are linked to more direct measures of neuronal function remain largely unknown. Here, we investigated how working memory load (WML)-dependent BOLD activation was related to an electrophysiological measure of interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) in a sample of 18 msTBI patients and 26 demographically matched controls from the UCLA RAPBI (Recovery after Pediatric Brain Injury) study. In the context of highly similar fMRI task performance, a subgroup of TBI patients with slow IHTT had greater BOLD activation with higher WML than both healthy control children and a subgroup of msTBI patients with normal IHTT. Slower IHTT treated as a continuous variable was also associated with BOLD hyperactivation in the full TBI sample and in controls. Higher WML-dependent BOLD activation was related to better performance on a clinical cognitive performance index, an association that was more pronounced within the patient group with slow IHTT. Our previous work has shown that a subgroup of children with slow IHTT after pediatric msTBI has increased risk for poor white matter organization, long-term neurodegeneration, and poor cognitive outcome. BOLD hyperactivations after msTBI may reflect neuronal compensatory processes supporting higher-order capacity demanding cognitive functions in the context of inefficient neuronal transfer of information. The link between BOLD hyperactivations and slow IHTT adds to the multi-modal validation of this electrophysiological measure as a promising biomarker

Optimal experimental designs for estimating genetic and non-genetic effects underlying infectious disease transmission

BACKGROUND: The spread of infectious diseases in populations is controlled by the susceptibility (propensity to acquire infection), infectivity (propensity to transmit infection), and recoverability (propensity to recover/die) of individuals. Estimating genetic risk factors for these three underlying host epidemiological traits can help reduce disease spread through genetic control strategies. Previous studies have identified important ‘disease resistance single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)’, but how these affect the underlying traits is an unresolved question. Recent advances in computational statistics make it now possible to estimate the effects of SNPs on host traits from epidemic data (e.g. infection and/or recovery times of individuals or diagnostic test results). However, little is known about how to effectively design disease transmission experiments or field studies to maximise the precision with which these effects can be estimated. RESULTS: In this paper, we develop and validate analytical expressions for the precision of the estimates of SNP effects on the three above host traits for a disease transmission experiment with one or more non-interacting contact groups. Maximising these expressions leads to three distinct ‘experimental’ designs, each specifying a different set of ideal SNP genotype compositions across groups: (a) appropriate for a single contact-group, (b) a multi-group design termed “pure”, and (c) a multi-group design termed “mixed”, where ‘pure’ and ‘mixed’ refer to groupings that consist of individuals with uniformly the same or different SNP genotypes, respectively. Precision estimates for susceptibility and recoverability were found to be less sensitive to the experimental design than estimates for infectivity. Whereas the analytical expressions suggest that the multi-group pure and mixed designs estimate SNP effects with similar precision, the mixed design is preferred because it uses information from naturally-occurring rather than artificial infections. The same design principles apply to estimates of the epidemiological impact of other categorical fixed effects, such as breed, line, family, sex, or vaccination status. Estimation of SNP effect precisions from a given experimental setup is implemented in an online software tool SIRE-PC. CONCLUSIONS: Methodology was developed to aid the design of disease transmission experiments for estimating the effect of individual SNPs and other categorical variables that underlie host susceptibility, infectivity and recoverability. Designs that maximize the precision of estimates were derived. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12711-022-00747-1

SN 2003du: Signatures of the Circumstellar Environment in a Normal Type Ia Supernova?

We present observations of the Type Ia supernova 2003du obtained with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and report the detection of a high-velocity component in the Ca II infrared triplet near 8000 Å, similar to features previously observed in SN 2000cx and SN 2001el. This feature exhibits a large expansion velocity (≈18,000 km s-1), which is nearly constant between -7 and +2 days relative to maximum light and disappears shortly thereafter. Other than this feature, the spectral evolution and light curve of SN 2003du resemble those of a normal SN Ia. We consider a possible origin for this high-velocity Ca II line in the context of a self-consistent spherical delayed-detonation model for the supernova. We find that the Ca II feature can be caused by a dense shell formed when circumstellar material of solar abundance is overrun by the rapidly expanding outermost layers of the SN ejecta. Model calculations show that the optical and infrared spectra are remarkably unaffected by the circumstellar interaction and the resulting shell. In particular, no hydrogen lines are detectable in either absorption or emission after the phase of dynamic interaction. The only qualitatively different features in the model spectra are the strong, high-velocity feature in the Ca II IR triplet around 8000 Å and a somewhat weaker O I feature near 7,300 Å. The Doppler shift and time evolution of these features provides an estimate for the amount of accumulated matter (decreasing Doppler shift with increasing shell mass) and also an indication of the mixing within the dense shell. For high shell masses (≈5 × 10-2 M☉), the high-velocity component of the Ca II line merges with the photospheric line forming a broad feature. A cutoff of the blue wings of strong, unblended lines (particularly the Si II feature at about 6,000 Å) may also be observable for larger shell masses. The model SN Ia light curves are little effected except at very early times when the shell is partially optically thick because of Thomson scattering, resulting in larger (B-V) colors by up to 0.3 mag. We apply these diagnostic tools to SN 2003du and infer that about 2 × 10-2 M☉ of solar abundance material may have accumulated in a shell prior to the observations. Furthermore, in this interpretation, the early light-curve data imply that the circumstellar material was originally very close to the progenitor system, perhaps from an accretion disk, Roche lobe, or common envelope. Because of the observed confinement of Ca II in velocity space and the lack of ongoing interaction inferred from the light curve, the matter cannot be placed in the outer layers of the exploding white dwarf star or related to a recent period of high mass loss in the progenitor system prior to the explosion. We note that the signatures of circumstellar interaction could be rather common in Type Ia supernovae and may have eluded discovery because optical spectra often do not extend significantly beyond 7500 Å

Zika virus preferentially replicates in the female reproductive tract after vaginal inoculation of rhesus macaques.

Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-transmitted virus that can cause severe defects in an infected fetus. ZIKV is also transmitted by sexual contact, although the relative importance of sexual transmission is unclear. To better understand the role of sexual transmission in ZIKV pathogenesis, a nonhuman primate (NHP) model of vaginal transmission was developed. ZIKV was readily transmitted to mature cycling female rhesus macaque (RM) by vaginal inoculation with 104-106 plaque-forming units (PFU). However, there was variability in susceptibility between the individual RM with 1->8 vaginal inoculations required to establish infection. After treatment with Depoprovera, a widely used contraceptive progestin, two RM that initially resisted 8 vaginal ZIKV inoculations became infected after one ZIKV inoculation. Thus, Depoprovera seemed to enhance susceptibility to vaginal ZIKV transmission. Unexpectedly, the kinetics of virus replication and dissemination after intravaginal ZIKV inoculation were markedly different from RM infected with ZIKV by subcutaneous (SQ) virus inoculation. Several groups have reported that after SQ ZIKV inoculation vRNA is rapidly detected in blood plasma with vRNA less common in urine and saliva and only rarely detected in female reproductive tract (FRT) secretions. In contrast, in vaginally inoculated RM, plasma vRNA is delayed for several days and ZIKV replication in, and vRNA shedding from, the FRT was found in all 6 animals. Further, after intravaginal transmission ZIKV RNA shedding from FRT secretions was detected before or simultaneously with plasma vRNA, and persisted for at least as long. Thus, ZIKV replication in the FRT was independent of, and often preceded virus replication in the tissues contributing to plasma vRNA. These results support the conclusion that ZIKV preferentially replicates in the FRT after vaginal transmission, but not after SQ transmission, and raise the possibility that there is enhanced fetal infection and pathology after vaginal ZIKV transmission compared to a mosquito transmitted ZIKV

The Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI): Psychometric Properties of a German-Language Adaptation, Temporal Stabilities of the Skills, and Associations with Personality and Intelligence

Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills comprise a broad set of abilities that are essential for building and maintaining relationships, regulating emotions, selecting and pursuing goals, or exploring novel stimuli. Toward an improved SEB skill assessment, Soto and colleagues recently introduced the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI). Measuring 32 facets from 5 domains with 192 items (assessment duration: ~15 min), BESSI constitutes the most extensive SEB inventory to date. However, so far, BESSI exists only in English. In three studies, we comprehensively validated a novel German-language adaptation, BESSI-G. Moreover, we expanded evidence on BESSI in three ways by (1) assessing the psychometric properties of the 32 individual skill facets, in addition to their domain-level structure; (2) providing first insights into the temporal stabilities of the 32 facets over 1.5 and 8 months; and (3) investigating the domains' and facets' associations with intelligence, in addition to personality traits. Results show that BESSI-G exhibits good psychometric properties (unidimensionality, reliability, factorial validity). Its domain-level structure is highly similar to that of the English-language source version. The facets show high temporal stabilities, convergent validity with personality traits, and discriminant validity with fluid and crystallized intelligence. We discuss implications for research on SEB skills.Soziale, emotionale und selbstregulatorischer Fähigkeiten (SEB) umfassen ein breites Spektrum von Fähigkeiten, die für den Aufbau und die Pflege von Beziehungen, die Regulierung von Emotionen, die Auswahl und Verfolgung von Zielen oder für die Erkundung neuer Reize unerlässlich sind. Auf dem Weg zu einer verbesserten Bewertung der SEB-Fähigkeiten haben Soto und Kolleg*innen vor kurzem das "Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI)" eingeführt. Es misst 32 Facetten aus 5 Domänen mit 192 Items